1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to a system and method of material control, and, more particularly, the invention relates to a system and method of material control utilizing a unique identifying indicia associated with each article within the material control system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Material control systems, as known in the art, are utilized to provide a journal of the kind and quantity of articles that are in stock and their location at any one time, for example, in the stockroom. As is well-known in the art, considerable paperwork is necessary to provide the journal and, therefore, considerable man hours are required to update the listing of articles and their storage locations within the stockroom because articles are constantly moved into and out of the stockroom. Additional time and effort is expended in verification of the journal because of the inaccuracies involved in the manual system. Periodic inventories of the stockroom are necessary to update exactly what articles are located in which of the storage locations.
An additional problem is that certain materials are diverted from the stockroom without having the paperwork processed to update the stockroom journal. For example, if a particular article was required immediately in a factory for construction of a particular machine, the article can be taken by an individual from its storage location out to the area where the machine is being constructed without the completion of any of the paperwork that is normally performed. In addition, in certain environments it is desirable to track articles through many uses and into and out of the stockroom several times over an extended period of time.
With the advent of the computer, certain material control systems began to utilize manual entry of data into a storage device for utilization by the computer. This allows the computer to generate the required journals on the number and storage location of each type of article within the stockroom. Although the use of the computer reduces somewhat the volume of the manual labor, the inaccuracies involved in keying the necessary data into the computer still generate errors so that periodic manual inventories continue to be necessary.
None of the prior systems utilize an optical character recognition (hereinafter referred to as ORC) device to reduce errors or to associate a label provided with unique OCR readable identifying indicia with each article so that the article can be tracked for as long as desired. Further, the use of such a label prevents the diversion of articles by allowing the tracking of the articles to their end use by utilizing the unique identifying indicia associated therewith.